


World Enough and Time

by Mab (Mab_Browne)



Category: The Sentinel
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Crossover, Fusion - Highlander, M/M, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-12
Updated: 2014-05-12
Packaged: 2018-01-24 12:37:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,051
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1605464
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mab_Browne/pseuds/Mab
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jim faces an unexpected situation and even more unexpectedly, Blair leaves him to face it alone.</p>
<p>Fusion with Highlander: The Series.  This is what happens when a TS fan indulges a binge of Highlander eps and fanfic.  Cameos from Methos and Duncan MacLeod. The beginning notes have info about Highlander if you're not familiar with the show.</p>
            </blockquote>





	World Enough and Time

**Author's Note:**

  * For [alassenya](https://archiveofourown.org/users/alassenya/gifts).



> This story is for Alassenya, who graciously accepted it as her Moonridge story even though it maybe wasn't what she expected. :-) Thank you to EE for looking this over for me.
> 
> Highlander: The Series follows the adventures of Duncan MacLeod, born in the sixteenth century and still alive. He's immortal, and can't be killed except by cutting off his head. The show follows his adventures down the centuries, where he meets other immortals, some friendly, some not. Methos aka Adam Pierson is the oldest immortal at 5,000 years old, and a sexy, sexy guy.... Moving on along, The Game is based on the idea that there is some prize awaiting the last immortal standing, and therefore some immortals will actively seek to kill others to hurry this eventuality. The Gathering is regarded as the inevitable expression of this- immortals drawn to duel with each other. A quickening is the life force of an immortal, which is symbolised by big thunder and lightning displays when the immortal is killed. 'Good' immortals, of course, only kill in self-defence, or else try to withdraw from the Game altogether. There are plenty of 'bad' immortals. Immortals may not kill each other on holy ground, or else terrible things will happen. No-one knows immortal orgins and they are foundlings, taken in by ordinary humans. They are observed by a society of mortals called Watchers, which added interesting characters to the show also.
> 
> There are more notes at the end, but they're spoilery. I'm assuming that readers are familiar with TS canon, which is referred to throughout this story.

After Sierra Verde, Jim wanted Blair to get angry with him. Blair was still uncomfortable around Jim, a persistent wariness that was starting to piss Jim off and give the lie to Blair's expressed understanding of what had happened. If Jim had been in Blair's place, he would have been good and pissed and showing it, and hopefully getting it out of his system rather than pussy-footing around. He wanted Blair to get angry with him. Sandburg tempers never lasted and then the air was cleared, and Blair - Blair would start talking to him again, rather than brooding and giving him sidelong looks when he didn't think that Jim was paying attention. Jim always paid attention.

Tonight, he offered Blair a beer, and made no demur to watching the boxing, even though it wasn't really his sport. When the phone rang Jim picked up and handed it to Blair when the caller asked for him, wondering if he could sneak some channel changing in while Blair talked to whoever it was.

Blair spoke his name into the phone, and then his face lost expression. Jim took one look and stood and went to the kitchen area, trying to convince himself that he was doing the right thing, and not losing a valuable opportunity for information, by giving Blair his privacy. The shocked blankness Jim had seen on Blair's face swiftly made bullshit of that argument. He listened in, while he fussed with make-work that made sure that Blair wouldn't see his own face.

"I am not discussing this with you over the phone," Blair said, his voice a low growl. Blair could get angry, even jeering, but Jim had never heard anything like this contemptuous dismissal come out of Blair, ever.

"A quiet evening at home with your ignorant friend, I presume." When Jim answered the phone, if you'd asked him what the voice sounded like, he'd have said it was a pleasant voice, womanly, mellow, maybe even sexy. Now it was an enemy's voice. The only question was what sort of enemy. "Never mind, it's not as if we need to talk. There's a disused warehouse on Ivors Road in Albert Town. You will come to it, within the hour. If you don't, I will find inducements. Your friend looks like a man who can take care of himself, but perhaps I could surprise him. And if I don't, then Thornton most certainly will. Thornton very much wanted to take your head himself, but I convinced him to be nice to me."

"Thornton's an asshole." An asshole with the amazing power to make good-natured, generous Blair sound as if he'd like to spit poison in his face.

"He loves you too. One hour."

The woman rang off, and Blair rose from the couch and turned to Jim. "It's a Naomi emergency. Brought to me by someone that I don't think much of, but hey, needs must." He nearly sprang forward, such was his hurry to get to the door of his room. "And needs must get the hell out of Cascade. I'm sorry, Jim, I have no idea how long this is going to take, but I'll let you know as soon as I do."

So it was like this, was it? Jim schooled his face into something that might look like concerned surprise. "Is Naomi sick?"

"No, but let's just say that some of her friends aren't as reliable as they could be." Blair was in his room, filling a bag with the urgency of someone who'd been told to run for the hills ahead of some apocalyptic wave. He had a leather satchel that Jim knew contained Blair's legal documents and certificates. That too went into the bag, without comment from either of them. Blair put on a pair of boots, and a jacket, and swept his bag strap over his shoulder and turned, to find that Jim was still in the doorway.

"Chief." Jim hesitated. Then, unsure whom he was giving one last chance to, he said, "You look bad. Is this anything you might need help with? A lift to the airport at least?"

"You..." Blair swallowed. "You're a good man, Jim, and thank you. But no. This is a solo mission, okay?" He grinned. It had to be the most unconvincing expression Jim had ever seen on a man's face. "I'll deal with this and be back making weird food in your kitchen before you know it's happening."

"I will always know when you're making weird food in my kitchen."

"Yeah." Blair held on to Jim's upper arm, like that coming wave was upon him and Jim might save him. And then he let go. "You're kinda in the way here. Gotta fly."

Jim stepped back from the doorway, just the way a good little friend blinded by the snow job in front of him should. "Sure. Take care."

"Always," Blair said, and was gone. Jim followed him with his hearing, even as he dashed to find his own jacket and keys, and his gun. Blair must have had his phone in his jacket pocket. Jim heard him call a number, which was speedily answered. Blair said, "Robert, it's me. I'm collecting my emergency supplies," and cut the connection. He sprinted across the road to his car, the bag jouncing against him, and drove off.

Jim was faced with two choices - follow Blair to wherever his 'emergency supplies' were, or head to the rendezvous that the woman had insisted on. It was a risk. Blair might simply choose to run hard from Cascade altogether, but the woman on the phone and her accomplice, Thornton, had threatened Jim. He had a feeling that Blair was going to make that meeting, and that meant that Jim could be there first.

Albert Town wasn't that far - a twenty minute drive at this quieter time of night. Jim parked some distance away, off a side street, which added another five minutes to his destination. But she, the enemy, had said that Blair (and Jim) had an hour. It didn't mean that she wasn't already there. It didn't mean that she might not be at some vantage point with a night sight and a sniper rifle. After that conversation, after the look on Blair's face, Jim knew that anything might be possible. And that meant that anything might be possible about who Blair Sandburg really was, but Jim would deal with that later.

He did a perimeter search around the warehouse area. There were some people in surrounding buildings, but nothing immediately suspicious, until he saw movement in a parked car, and heard the quick, anxious beat of a heart. As good a place to start as any.

He approached the car from behind. There was no evidence that whoever it was had a weapon ready - Jim knew the glint of the metal and the smell of the oil. The driver's door was even unlocked, and Jim tugged it open and said, deadpan, to the startled middle-aged woman inside, "Licence and registration please. " He backed up his demand with his weapon.

"What?" the woman said, and Jim relaxed the smallest amount. This was not the voice of the woman who'd called Blair. She stammered a moment and then gasped out, "Please, don't shoot."

"I don't intend to shoot unless I'm given cause. This isn't a safe place for a lady to wait in her car."

"I broke down. I'm waiting on a friend," she protested.

"Licence and registration," Jim repeated, not believing a word of it.

"A gun is not a badge," the woman said, and Jim was certain, just like that, that she knew who he was.

"Blair Sandburg," he said, just to see the reaction. She had herself under control now, but Jim was a sentinel.

"How would I know what your name is if you don't show me your badge? Or shoot me, if that's what you're going to do."

Jim lowered but didn't holster his gun. "What do you know about this? About Sandburg?"

"Nothing!" She was lying.

"Fine then," Jim said, and turned back towards the warehouse.

The woman scrambled out of her car and called out, "Detective Ellison!"

Jim swung around, ostentatiously casual. "Now we're getting some honesty. What do you want with Sandburg?"

"Nothing, I'm just an observer."

"And what," Jim asked with arctic calm," are you observing?"

"I can't tell you that. But I will tell you that you should leave. You can only be a distraction, a danger to Blair and to yourself. Go home, Detective."

Jim's grip on his weapon was sure and steady, but his teeth ground in fury. "What is this? What the hell is Sandburg up to?"

"Surviving. I hope. Give Blair five minutes, Detective. It'll all be over and I'll answer any questions for you that he can't."

Why ask this woman for answers when Jim could hear a car approaching? Car engines sounded much the same, but Jim was almost certain that this was Blair. The car stopped on Ivors Road proper, unlike this woman who was a lot's space over on another road. Jim hesitated, and then turned away from her. The fence was tall chain link, but slack and gaping away from the frame at one point. Jim slipped through and headed for the warehouse.

"Detective!" the woman called after him. "You need to keep your distance. It's not safe."

Tell it to a civilian, lady, Jim thought, picking his way over the broken concrete pad alongside the building. He found a door, unlocked and open, and went in.

The space was nearly empty. There were a few crates in one corner, some pallets, and a forklift with slashed tyres. Blair stood in the rough centre of the building, and his face when he saw Jim was unconcealed horror.

"What are you doing here?"

"Figured I'd come and see what kind of trouble it was that you didn't want to tell me about."

"Get out of here. Get out of here, now, Jim." Blair turned away from Jim to stare at a spot along the warehouse wall. He followed it in the direction of an open roller door, like he was tracking something moving at a brisk walking pace, and if Jim focused he could identify soft footfalls. Blair pivoted back to face Jim. He was carrying a machete. He smelled of metal and gun oil, not like himself at all. "If I tell you that I know what I'm doing, will you trust that for once? Get out of here. Get _away_. Please."

I'm not going anywhere, Jim thought. But he backed away, watching the roller door entrance until a woman appeared and stepped into the wan electrical light from the strung bulbs of the warehouse ceiling. She was tall and very beautiful, an old-Hollywood Latin movie star deigning to mingle with her public, and she carried a sword.

Jim lifted his gun. "Cascade PD. Put down your weapon."

Blair made a noise between exasperation and despair.

"Please excuse this man. He doesn't understand what's going on here."

"Obviously," the woman said, with a purity of contempt that Jim had last heard in boot camp.

"Jim. Leave now."

Blair's voice hit him like a slap in the face. No, Jim thought, but he still turned and jogged towards the door he'd entered through. Turn around, turn around, he commanded himself, but still he moved, he stepped out into the dark evening, and shut the door behind him. With an effort that felt like his heart had somehow sling-shot out through his ribs, he stopped and held his ground. He saw the woman in the car about thirty yards away. She gestured frantically at him. He ignored her, and tried to turn and walk right back into the warehouse - but he couldn't do it.

Somewhere during that impossible exit and Jim's painful maintenance of his position, the woman and Blair had begun to talk. Jim had missed the beginning of their discussion, but now he crouched beside the warehouse wall, throwing open his hearing, taking in every little detail he could to 'see'.

The woman and Blair stood opposite each other, wary and poised. Blair's machete was hopelessly outclassed next to the blade of the sword.

Blair, being Blair, seemed to be doing most of the talking.

"Have you ever considered that maybe the Game is a bunch of bullshit? Chinese whispers gone crazy wrong?

The woman carrying the sword shook her head. "I think that you're a coward who will try anything to keep your head on your shoulders."

"I'm attached to it." Blair grinned, his mouth gone broad and manic. "Get it? But seriously. I don't want to fight you. I don't want any of us to fight each other, because it _is_ bullshit, and there are amazingly more valuable things to be done with our life spans than fight idiot duels."

The woman paused. "You're serious," she said, in a tone almost of awe, somebody discovering a rare curiosity that they'd heard of but never truly believed was possible.

Blair held out his free hand. "Serious as a heart attack. I'll put my weapon down if you will. Or we can just both walk away and do something better with our time. Years and years of opportunity ahead of you, and this is what you want to do with it?"

Some of the readiness dropped out of the woman's stance, and she took a couple of steps forward. Blair, Jim was glad to note, took a couple of steps back.

"If I let you go, then Thornton will make sure that I don't have any years ahead of me at all."

"That live by the sword, die by the sword thing is a kicker, isn't it? But I managed to keep ahead of him for a very long time, I could help you do the same. If you just drop out then he'd assume that I'd killed you. Who's going to tell him otherwise?"

The woman's lip curled. "Our kind gossip like old women when we're not trying to kill each other. Someone will recognise me and tell him, and he'll find me, just like we found you."

Blair's whole body signalled his frustration. "Come on, give me a break here. Why should you care about a five hundred year old grudge?"

"Because Thornton wants me strong, and even your quickening will help make me so."

Could you 'hear' someone roll their eyes? "But not so strong that he won't be able to take you when he gets bored with you. Then it won't matter how 'nice' anybody is."

"Shut up, little liar."

"The truth stings, doesn't it?" With obvious effort, Blair controlled his voice. "Look, come on, I don't have any beef with you. It doesn't have to be this way."

You aren't convincing her, Chief, Jim thought. This really isn't your evening to make friends and influence people. Blair waited; one hand held the machete still, but the other was outreached in question and attempted persuasion. They all waited for a moment that strung out like overstretched taffy and then the woman yelled, a battle cry if ever Jim had heard such a thing, and leapt towards Blair. He dodged her, fumbling at the back of his jeans for the gun that was there, that smell of oil and metal that Jim had found so wrong on him. He'd wanted Blair to know how to carry, but his hands never smelled right after he held a gun. It was the least of their problems now, as Jim struggled with the renewed compulsion to run. He wouldn't run. He would not.

Blair had the gun in his left hand, and he fired three shots in quick succession. One of them missed, one hit the woman in her right upper shoulder, the other hit her square in the chest. Jim knew that because he could hear the bullets as they hit, he could smell the blood on her body. She dropped, and her sword fell with her, a sharp metal shriek on the concrete floor.

Whatever it was that held Jim poised to run eased, but he didn't step back inside the warehouse. Instead, he waited, knowing that there was more.

"I told you the Game is bullshit; and that's why I cheat," Blair rasped, before he laughed. "It has been one hundred and twenty nine years since our last quickening," he said, riding the sharp edge of hysteria while hefting the machete. He walked towards the woman lying helpless on the floor. A weak, liquid rattle of breath rose from her.

The same appalled revulsion that choked Jim's throat, was it on Blair's face? "Once, just once, I would like people to actually maybe consider that I have something worthwhile to say. At least, some of the people swinging the enormous pieces of very sharp metal at me." He lifted his machete. "This is such a fucking waste. Such a waste, but you won't give up, will you? " Blair's hand sliced downwards. Jim thought that maybe he heard the whisper of the blade cutting the air before it separated the woman's head from her body.

"Jesus." Jim could never have imagined such a thing. Never in his wildest dreams, in his worst nightmares. Senses wide open as they were, when the first lightning bolt blasted its path between ground and sky the noise paralysed him. He couldn't even lift his hands to shelter his ears, but leaned drunkenly against the wall of the warehouse, captive to the force of sound and light, the hairs on his body on end both with the arc of current that flew through the air and with animal dread. His body shook with the force before consciousness retreated against the onslaught.

The next thing he was aware of was his stumbling trek forward. A familiar strength supported him. A familiar voice cussed Jim out with vehemence and imagination. He tried to speak. "'andbur...." rumbled incoherently out of his mouth.

"Do not speak to me, Jim. You need to save your co-ordination for getting to my car, and I am way too pissed to give you a civil answer. Just shut up and walk."

Jim endured a disoriented sense of betrayal. Blair was pissed? Jim had watched Blair commit murder, and he was still jangling with the physical effects of whatever that sound and light show had been, and _Blair_ was pissed? He opened his mouth, ready to flay Blair, and instead his breath caught the wrong way and he choked and then coughed, sinking to his knees before he could finally catch his breath.

"Get up, Jim, we can't afford much more time." Blair's Volvo was a curved hulk in the darkness, and Jim was bundled into the passenger seat with no regard for his joints or length of leg. Blair ran around to the driver's side and took off with a screech of tyres that ran down Jim's spine like chalkboard scratches. Jim sat in the seat of the car, but he was going down in a rough and bottomless sea of questions. He opened his eyes. He'd fallen asleep and never realised it, and some twenty minutes of driving must have passed judging by the familiar streets outside the car. Jim watched Blair grab for the stick shift as he changed down to park the Volvo just down the street from home; his hands trembled.

Jim swallowed. His mouth was dry and forcing out words was a struggle. "What was that? What are you?"

Blair smiled, that over-bright 'trust me, even though I look like a crazy man' smile. "What am I? Not your problem anymore, that's what I am." He jumped out of his seat and ran to open Jim's door, hauling Jim out with enough speed and force that Jim reeled. He nearly fell against Blair but caught himself. Blair cupped Jim's face between his hands. There were blood smears on the base of two nails, and spatters of it ran up his face. "Take care of yourself, you reckless son of a bitch. How the hell you haven't died before now is beyond me." Then he pushed Jim clear both of himself and the car, got in, and took off at a rate that would do credit to the Daytona Speedway.

It was tricky the next day, explaining why Jim's truck was located near the site of a spectacularly explosive arson. It was hard to find plausible answers to the questions when Jim's head ached, and his ears still rang, and sick, confused fury made it a wonder that he didn't puke into a trash bin with every second sentence, but he managed, even to finding answers about Blair's involvement that meant that no-one put out an APB for him.

Jim got an email later in the week. Thornton wouldn't bother Jim. Blair wouldn't bother with the rest of his things. No bother all round, apparently.

No Blair, either. He was gone, and the discreet abuse of PD resources found no trace of him.

~*~

Six months later, Naomi called, her voice taut with strain. "I don't know how to break this gently, Jim. Blair's dead. A car crash in Nevada."

Jim stood silent so long that Naomi asked, "Jim? Jim, are you there?"

There was a haze in front of Jim's eyes. "Tell him that I don't believe a word of it. You can do that, I guess, whatever you were to him? Mommy dearest? His handler? His fucking fairy godmother?"

Naomi's silence was shorter than Jim's. "I can't tell him a thing. He's cut himself off from me and I don't even know why. I was his friend, and he was the only person who stood by me, who was entirely on my side ever since I was a very young woman, and I'd hoped that I could rely on him being there for the rest of my life." She sounded close to tears, but raging tears, the sort that streamed down someone's face while they screamed their anger. "I don't even know why," she repeated with a shaking voice and then she was gone, only the whine of the disconnect tone to mark that anyone had called.

~*~

A reckless son of a bitch, Blair had called him. Reckless sons of bitches got what was coming to them, and the something that was coming to Jim was a bullet from Tony Jensen's gun. The ground was hard on his knees, and his shoulders ached from the drag of his arms bound behind his back, and his head was full of futile apologies for abandoning people he knew would grieve for him. Sorry, sorry, sorry. Blair, I'm sorry.

~*~  
Jim couldn't breathe. He couldn't move, and he kept transitioning between void and spine-freezing panic. He couldn't breathe, he couldn't move. Vibration pierced him, interspersed with voices.

"Will you be careful?"

"Speed is rather of the essence, and he will heal any damage we do to him."

"Maybe he will, but I'd still rather not put a jackhammer bit through-"

The voice was lost in vibration and shattering pain, and then he could breathe. After a fashion. He could breathe, in between the coughing and choking, but he still couldn't move.

"Here," one voice said. "Try this."

"I am not levering him out with a crowbar!" Indignation filled her voice. That's Naomi. Why is Naomi here, Jim thought.

"And _I'm_ not explaining this mess to the authorities because you're squeamish. You've hung around our mutual friend long enough to know what we can cope with." English, Jim thought. Pissed off, wait a minute, crowbar? - and then thought was lost in a sharp line of pain and a long, excruciating drag of raw friction. Jim could breathe well enough to scream, and he did.

"Oh, sweetie, oh I'm sorry. You're hurting him!"

"I've also freed him. Van, now. It's time to go." Someone strong lifted Jim, while he panted in agony. He could breathe now, but his only movement was a serpentine writhe of agony. "Enough of that, Jim. Keep calm, and everything will be fine." It was impatient, a medic telling truth but with no time for nonsense, and Jim pressed his lips together and tried to be calm. His eyes felt gritty and burnt. He opened them for the first time since awareness returned to see the cream coloured roof of a van as he was laid on a mattress on the floor. They lurched into motion.

There was a man kneeling beside Jim. He held a water bottle, one with a cap with a thick, bending plastic straw. Jim could see every little scratch in the plastic, every tiny deposit of mineral from the water that must have passed through it, every pore of the man's skin, before his sight blurred with irritated tears "Here, try this," the man said. "One small sip until we know what will happen."

Jim sucked on the straw and an orgasm of cool water filled his mouth before it was taken away. "More," he demanded.

"Give it a moment to make sure it stays put." 

Moments passed, while the water hit Jim's gut like a rock. He shut his eyes again, and thought about breathing. Blair was always telling him to breathe, and after a while he felt better.

Jim struggled up onto an elbow. He still ached, but the pain was lessening almost literally by the minute.

English raised one eyebrow. "Fast work. On that basis, yes, you can have some more, but go slow."

Jim took more mouthfuls of glorious water and demanded, "Who are you?"

Naomi's accomplice had a sharp, angular face to go with the crisp voice and manner. "I'm your knight in shining armour. Or maybe that's Naomi, even if her steed was a back hoe. I'm the one who stole it for her, though."

Jim stared. "You wouldn't care to explain that?" His face stung, and he rubbed his hand gently across where it was most sore. Tiny pieces of gravel fell to the mattress, a lot of it, and then Jim started to cough, deep racking convulsions that stabbed pain across his back. English deftly laid an old towel in front of him. Jim gagged and spat, several times over, while a dark, wet mess fell from his mouth.

"That should be the worst of it," English remarked, as if Jim coughed out enormous blood clots every day. " A shower and a change of clothes and you'll be a new man." The towel was whipped away and stowed in a trash bag.

The mention of clothes made Jim look down at himself. He was filthy as well as sore. His clothes were torn in places, and encrusted with grit and what looked like tar. The tar made sharp creases in the fabric that bit into his skin and Jim's stomach turned. He looked like he'd been buried alive, but he'd surely been dead, dead fast enough to have never heard the roar of Jensen's gun. He closed his hand around English Sharp-face's wrist. "What the hell is going on?" He drew breath for more outrage and then paused, and bent his until his nose was almost touching the woollen knit of the stranger's sweater. And then he lunged, his hands hooked into the stranger's clothes to bang him against the side of the van.

"Where is he?" Jim recalled that there was a potentially more reliable source of information in the driver's seat, and struck out for the front of the van before he was yanked to a stop by an efficient and painful choke hold.

"Let's not distract Ms Sandburg while she's driving. She's a little more fragile than you and I. And if the 'he' you're asking after is Blair Sandburg, then the short answer is that Blair is dead."

"Like hell," Jim wheezed. "I can smell him on you."

"The other short answer is that the immortal formerly known as Blair Sandburg headed off wherever he saw fit, and I don't know where that is. If he wants you to know he'll tell you, although if this is your usual method of enquiry I'd stay well away if I was him." Jim was released and put out his hand to brace against the side of the van, which had just made a sharp turn.

"Do you have anything you'd like to tell me, Naomi?" If he'd choked gravel up out of his throat as well as blood, it wouldn't have surprised him.

"Oh, Jim, please don't take it personally. This was the first time I'd seen him since he faked his death and he hasn't told me where he's holed up either. He's being quite ridiculous about this, although I shouldn't be surprised. Blair's always had issues." They stopped for a red light. "I told him he should try counselling, but he pointed out, and yes, he had a point, that counselling wouldn't do any good if he couldn't tell the whole truth. And when I suggested that surely at least one immortal must have gone into psychology, he told me that the only one he knew about was dead, and completely shut down the conversation. He's very stubborn."

Jim rose and leaned against the passenger seat of the van. His last words to Blair had been 'what are you?' and he was going to get some answers. "Naomi, Blair's psychological issues are the least of what's bothering me right now."

Naomi cast a quick, apologetic look his way before she returned her attention to driving. "Jim, I promise you that we'll explain everything once we reach our destination. It won't take that long, Seacouver is practically just up the road. We can all shower, maybe have some tea, and then we'll have a long chat. I can tell you some of it, and Adam can fill you in on the... broader issues."

"Adam?"

"That would be me." English - Adam - grinned. "I first met Blair when he was Conlaed O'Bryn - and that would have been back in, let me think, 1356. Allowing for calendar reformation since then."

"That's not funny."

Adam didn't seem to find it funny anymore, either. "Oh come on, _Detective_. We weren't talking about immortals because it's a pretty turn of phrase. It's what Blair is. It's what I am. It's what you are."

"I'm a sentinel." When did that become the thing that Jim would define himself as in the face of insanity?

Adam cocked one eyebrow. Jim would swear that he was amused again and also very close to having Jim's hands around his throat. "If Blair has been trotting at your heels for any length of time then that goes without saying. Blair and sentinels go together like beer and pretzels."

"Oh, Adam!" Was Naomi someone's mother, even if she wasn't Blair's? She certainly had a good line in a scolding tone. "Do you have to be so bald about it?"

Adam looked at Jim with detached compassion. "There isn't really a gentle way to break this sort of news. Blair and I have lived hundreds of years, Jim. And so can you, if you learn to keep your head." He smiled, like he'd just made a joke, but Jim remembered the thunk of the machete meeting bone and the blood on Blair's hands and face.

Jim leaned against the unadorned side of the van and drew up his knees in a betraying gesture of self-containment. "You know," he said wearily, "I think I'll wait for that shower, and the tea, before I think any more about this."

"Probably not a bad plan at that," Adam said agreeably. He put another water bottle within Jim's reach, along with a small cooler and then leaned against the back of the passenger seat, stretching out long legs, before he took a pocket torch and ratty paperback out of the pocket of his jacket and started to read. Jim opened the cooler. It contained three big deli-style sandwiches, good ones, one pastrami, one roast beef, one turkey. The sight of them in the dim, flashing light that came through the van windows was surreal, grotesque; but no more so than the way Jim's mouth ran with saliva. The scent of them filled the back of the van - and Jim was starving.

~*~

They reached Seacouver and Naomi drove them to an older area that spanned offices and industrial buildings. It was still dark, although dawn wasn't so far away, and they hurried inside one building and into a freight elevator with an artistic paint job. At the top of the elevator shaft was a spare, airy space that achingly reminded Jim of his home, and a new stranger. Jim hesitated to step out - a nervy, foreign sensation crawled over him. 

"It's what we call presence," Adam said. "A warning that other immortals are about. With me it was probably lost in the overall weirdness of rising from the dead. You get used to it. And people are usually safe with MacLeod."

Naomi turned to him. Her face was pale and drawn even in the soft night-time lighting of the room. "It's fine, Jim. Really." She smiled, an impish grin that reminded Jim of her not-son. "And if you don't want me to beat you to the bathroom, you really should come in properly."

"When you put it like that," Jim said, and stepped over the threshold.

Their host stepped forward, putting out his hand. "Detective Ellison. I'm Duncan MacLeod."

"You're another friend of Blair's?"

"He's no more than an acquaintance. It's Adam who counts as his friend, and Adam is my friend, and here you are." He was handsome, this MacLeod. The soft brown eyes and good-looking face might have made him dismissible as a pretty boy, if the looks weren't counterpointed by his body's solid muscle and athlete's grace. "You've had quite a shock, and you can't be comfortable in those clothes. May I show you the bathroom or would you prefer to rest?"

Quite the perfect host. "A shower. Thank you," Jim replied, and was ushered into a comfortable bathroom which was already stocked with towels and soaps, fresh disposable razors and a toothbrush, and clean sweats. He stripped off his ruined, gritty clothes, and between stripping and walking into the shower scattered yet more gravel behind him. It pattered as it hit the floor. He still wore his watch, but it was broken; the glass was cracked and the casing deformed, and he peeled it away from his wrist and dropped it with the rest of his destroyed belongings. He avoided looking in the mirror, or paying much attention to what he might see in any reflection. His body was whole enough, but Jim didn't know himself and he didn't want to see the stranger who might be looking out of his eyes.

The shower felt almost as good as that first mouthful of water, and Jim groaned at the relief of being clean. He was hard put not to stay under the water forever, but there were explanations awaiting him. Jim dried and dressed himself, and walked out into the living area.

~*~

Naomi explained a little of it, her legs crossed under her as she sat on the couch. There was too much that she either didn't know or wouldn't speak of. She'd known Blair as an adult, unchanging man for thirty years. She did say that Blair had been absolutely distraught from the moment that he realised Jim was dead and was remaining dead. Beside himself was how she put it, and he'd led them to the site where Jim had been 'recovered' and stayed right up to Naomi using the back-hoe to peel off the first layer of asphalt. Jim noted that Blair wasn't 'beside' anyone else right now. 

How Blair located Jim was one of the gaps - it wasn't something the immortals could explain either. Sentinel lore, Adam Pierson suggested, with an eloquent, dismissive shrug. Not his area of expertise. He explained quite a lot of the rest, though, augmented with the occasional remark from MacLeod.

Jim had been buried alive for five days, disposed of under road repairs in a suburban Cascade shopping precinct. It had been corruption in City contracts that had been under investigation. Kickbacks. Fraud. The same old story.

Jim had been dead, and now he was alive again, and the only way he could truly die was if someone cut off his head. He would never grow old. Blair had known he was a sentinel, and he'd known that Jim was pre-immortal, and he'd told him one, but not the other. 

He heard about quickenings and the Game, about millennia of immortal myth and legend. That was where he figured out how Blair and Pierson came to be friends because Pierson's passionate enthusiasm bled through his usual manner when it came to scholarly matters. It reminded Jim of Blair, and he said so, and MacLeod chuckled at Pierson's only partly mock wince of offence in a way that made Jim like him rather a lot.

It was bewildering and crazy-making and Jim could barely begin to comprehend the implications. His future. His past - and the fact that William Ellison wasn't his father. Grace Ellison wasn't his mother. But what stung the deepest was understanding that it hadn't really been Jim who brought Blair back at the fountain. In one way it had terrified Jim, but in another? There'd been intense satisfaction that Blair would come back from the dead for him, for James Joseph Ellison; just one time Jim had taken pleasure at being something outside of the common, and now that was gone.

~*~

Jim and Naomi took to spending a lot of time in MacLeod's dojo when it was free. Naomi meditated for hours, folded up in the lotus as if she were herself some exotic flower. Jim used the small, but very expensive, selection of exercise equipment, and worked his way through the sword drills that MacLeod was teaching him.

"Blair hates the Game," Naomi said once, watching him.

Jim lowered the sword. "I can understand why. But I like being alive."

"And you were a soldier. You've killed before now." Naomi's voice took on a degree of chill.

"So has Blair," Jim said, and resumed his exercises. When he finished, Naomi was still there, looking out the window.

"Why are you hanging around me? " It was blunt, and probably ungrateful, but Jim couldn't figure it out, and he was sick of unanswered questions.

She sighed. "Because Blair. And sentinels. I keep hoping that he'll come back to you, and back to me too that way."

"You've known him a long time." Jim was trying not be jealous about that, or angry about the way that Blair had apparently discussed him with Naomi behind his back.

"Yes." Naomi sat down, leaning back against the wall. She looked youthful in her way, slim and well-cared for, but Jim saw every line on her face, the way that the skin was loosening about her jaw. "You haven't asked me who the little boy in the photographs was."

Jim shrugged, and sat opposite her but some distance away, and remembered. Sitting on his bed in Cascade with Naomi while she showed him pictures of a little boy and told stories of a childhood that Blair never had. "I hadn't thought of it. And if I had, it wouldn't have occurred to me that it was important."

Naomi smiled, but it was only a ghost of happiness. "Blair's followed his dreams for hundreds of years, quite literally, Jim. He knows where he'll find sentinels, but it's not precise. He can wait a while sometimes. Nearly ten years in Cascade."

Jim nodded, acknowledging the information. Blair was patient when it came to sentinels, and Jim wasn't as special as he'd thought he was.

"But with my little Sunray, he found us when I was six months pregnant, and he told me that my little boy was going to be a wonder. Even for the Age of Aquarius, I suppose it was a stupid story, but I was very young, and very scared under all the bravado, and to have this pretty man hold my hand and tell me that my baby was important - well, I needed somebody, and that somebody was Blair. And Blair was so delighted to have found his baby sentinel. He was all the father that my little boy needed." She paused a moment and then she grinned. "Yes, we were lovers. I was in love with him, I suppose, but you know me. It never lasts, but it didn't need to. Blair wasn't in love with me, he enjoys his infatuations but he never takes them seriously. I think I mentioned issues?" she said with a delicate, knowing arch of her brow. "But we were always great friends, just some of the time it was friends with benefits." She burst into a fit of giggles, and for a moment she was that teenage hippie girl again. "Oh, Jim, your face."

"Never mind my face," Jim retorted, and then gentled his tone. "Go on with your story, Naomi. I'm guessing that there isn't a happy ending here?"

"No, no there's not. I've done my share of commune and farm work, in between arrangements that were more what you might call 'urbane'." She smiled, and Jim presumed that Blair's tales of Naomi's bevy of lovers had basis in fact. "I know my way around quite a lot of heavy machinery. Blair taught me. We were living on a farm. There were several children besides Sunray, and they loved it. They ran wild, and maybe we adults..." There was a long hesitation, and Jim waited for what he knew was coming. "Maybe we weren't always as careful as we could be. There was an accident, with a tractor plough. Blair thought that maybe my boy had zoned, one of those sentinel things. Poor Blair, he ran so hard but it was no good. Sunray didn't go under, but he had terrible head injuries. Blair was caught under the blades, and of course he should have died."

Sunray must have been about ten. His death was twenty years in the past, and Naomi had aged, but Blair still looked the same. "But he didn't die," Jim said.

"No, no, he didn't. And I... I couldn't understand it, why was he alive and my beautiful, special boy dead. I think he told me the truth about himself as much to process his own grief as anything. He left the commune, because the questions became so intrusive, and he needed to grieve on his own, but we kept in touch. He'd find holy ground, places that were safer for someone like him."

"St Sebastian's...." Jim murmured.

"Yes. Marcus didn't know, but Jeremy did." They shared a look that suggested respect rather than liking for Jeremy and his prickly passion for Mother Church. "It seemed a great joke to pretend to be his mother when he came to Rainier - and he was genuinely excited at the possibility of another academic career, it's why he skewed his identity so young, even though it might have been a risk if he'd found you earlier."

Jim smiled at that. "I'm not sure how willing I'd have been to take advice from an eighteen year old."

"He'd complain that you weren't willing to take advice as it was." 

Jim reminded himself that tactless straight talking wasn't actually a family trait shared between Naomi and Blair. Or perhaps she got it from him. "Maybe if I'd had all the facts."

Naomi frowned. "How could he tell you all the facts?"

"He could have tried. He didn't seem to have any trouble telling them to you."

"Oh, Jim." Naomi rose, to sit beside Jim rather than opposite him. "I know you're a private man. Blair would vent to me, a good friend to a good friend, but not actually that many details, and of course I knew you must be a sentinel after Sunray. Believe it or not, I ended up reading between the lines a _lot_. And Blair - Blair was so afraid of failing you, the way he thought he failed my little boy. He second-guessed himself a lot with you."

"So if he was so scared of failing me, where has he been?" It was the only question that Jim needed an answer to. The rest of all this mess could work itself out in time, something that was now apparently in unlimited supply.

"Second-guessing himself?" Naomi suggested. Lines of strain were graven around her eyes, and the tendons of her throat looked taut. For all her calm, recounting her history had cost her. "I don't know. I'm angry about it myself. All that meditation. He's made enemies - I suppose you can't avoid it over six hundred years, and if he's not prepared to play the Game then I guess he has to go to ground sometimes. But I'm worried for him, Jim. It's only natural that he was distressed about your situation when you died, but he was... oh I don't know how to describe him. Too much of his distress was conviction that you'd hate him when you knew everything."

"When I died." Jim pinched the bridge of his nose, trying to overcome the sense of unreality that crawled over him. "I wouldn't have been happy with him. I'm not exactly happy now. And if he'd figured out that this shit was coming to me, maybe he thought that he had time to explain himself." So far Jim could understand. "But he was there. He was there and he didn't stay."

Naomi patted Jim's arm, an uncomfortable confirmation that his misery was plain. "He's a mystery all too often, but he does love you."

Jim froze, but said with a good imitation of nonchalance, "I think I figured that one out, Naomi." He silently willed Naomi to leave the discussion there, but she didn't. Naomi couldn't leave things alone, not Jim's furniture, not this.

"I mean, he's in love with you."

"And I'm not stupid, okay!"

Naomi recoiled at Jim's shout, and then her face became stern. "And would you have done anything about it? Aside from kicking his ass out of your home?" Jim focused sharply on a memory - boxes of Blair's things, and Blair standing hurt and confused in the middle of them.

"I don't know. It never seemed to be the right time, and before he left - there was stuff that went down. I hadn't treated him very well." Did Blair keep seeing Jim kissing Alex whenever he sent those not so discreet looks in Jim's direction? "But since he seems to have washed his hands of both of us," - a mean reminder, but why should Jim suffer alone? - "I guess the time has come and gone."

Naomi could take a hint with the best of them.

~*~

To be Jim Ellison, or not to be? Both Pierson and MacLeod counselled against going back to Cascade. People had seen Jim definitively dead, and however unwilling they might be to publicly reveal that, there were always rumours, and hunting immortals who listened for those sorts of rumours, hoping to take the quickening of someone young and untried.

Nearly forty years old, and he was the baby again, the raw recruit, the rookie.

MacLeod offered Jim some starting money, a loan to help make up for lost assets in Cascade. Jim figured that MacLeod could afford it, and he felt more comfortable with that debt as compared to the debt he owed Pierson. Jim wasn't stupid enough to believe that MacLeod was any safer a man to owe than Pierson, but he had a notion that when the debt fell due that he'd understand better the why and the how of anything that MacLeod might want from him. That uncertainty about Pierson kept Jim's mouth closed against any appeal for suggestions as to where Blair might be.

He sheared his hair back to almost nothing, and grew a beard. It came through with lines of grey at the corners of his mouth, and made Jim look ten years older.

He wandered, and found work as a caretaker for a Wisconsin rich man's Lake Superior summer home. Summer estate was more like it, but there was a cabin for his use set back from the main house, and a man had all the privacy he could ever want in the winter months.

It was a hard winter, and a bitter winter in a way unrelated to any mercury reading. The spring was coy, veiling itself behind a briskly chill wind, when Jim heard the noise of a car engine long before the frisson of presence ran over him. There'd been a high wind the day before and some winter stressed branches had cracked, trailing down but not falling. Jim was up on a ladder, trimming the damage, and he got down and tidied his tools. Maybe he was fooling himself, no fool like an old fool (and who was that, exactly, he wondered) but he thought he knew who was coming.

He was waiting in front of his little cabin, sitting on the porch stoop, when the car came into view. When Blair got out, Jim didn't rise. He waited until Blair stood about six feet away and said, "The wanderer returns."

Blair flinched at Jim's greeting, but he didn't rise to the sarcasm. "Jim. Hey." He'd cut his hair, and changed the style of his glasses to a heavier frame. They didn't suit him. "It's been a while."

"Eighteen months, give or take. But what's that between friends?" Another point to Jim, but not that much satisfaction in it. Jim stood. "Do you want coffee, or a beer?"

"Coffee would be good."

"You'd better come in then."

Jim made coffee, while Blair stood in the open plan living area and shifted nervously on his feet. The percolator was too loud, and the hiss and spit of the water got on Jim's last nerve. At yet another rocking movement from Blair, Jim growled, "Sit down," dismayed by the depth of irritation his voice betrayed.

Blair sat, but seated he was no more at rest than standing. His toes tapped, his hands fidgeted. Jim handed him the coffee and Blair's hands wrapped around the cup even though it must have burnt him. Jim leaned against the counter that separated the living area from the small kitchen and sipped his own coffee. He couldn't taste a thing.

Blair's head had been bent low but now he lifted it to look at Jim. Stared at him, as if he couldn't quite believe that Jim was real. "I thought that I'd start with 'I'm sorry' and then expound matters from there."

"Very scholarly of you." The coffee was tasteless, and the counter edge was a buzz saw digging into the back of Jim's spine. He remained where he was all the same.

Blair's cup dropped from his hands. It wasn't a conscious gesture of anger, Blair simply needed his hands to emphasise his words. "Will you stop that?"

"Stop what?" Jim asked. He was at his worst right now and he knew it.

"Saying your words like you think I'm the biggest shit that ever lived but you're too polite to be explicit about it. If you don't want to listen to me then say so and I'll get out of your hair."

Jim could taste his coffee, because there was something bitter in his mouth. Blair would leave again so easily. "And nothing changes."

Blair went white. "Oh screw this," he snapped, and stood and walked out the door.

Jim shut his eyes. Maybe he could have dealt with this better. He expected to hear Blair gun his engine down the driveway, but instead he heard footsteps on the steps of his porch, and Blair came in again. He held a sword in his hands, sheathed, and he marched across the carpet, past the dropped cup and the coffee stain soaking into the carpet, and presented the sword to Jim, holding it out held across the palms of both hands.

"Take it." When Jim hesitated, Blair insisted. "Take it, Jim. Draw it and see how it feels, if you like. I don't use it but I think you might find it useful." Jim didn't usually get offered gifts quite this aggressively.

The sheath was plain, as was the sword. Jim drew it, and tried the grip and the weight. It felt right, balanced, although this was more a sentinel appreciation than any developed knowledge of bladed weapons.

Blair said quietly, "It's a hand and a half. A bastard sword some people call them, which is appropriate," and then he dropped to his knees.

Jim backed away so fast that the edge of the kitchen counter once more jarred into his back. "What the fuck are you doing? Get on your feet." He didn't know what to do with the length of wicked metal in his hand. Jim wasn't accustomed to feeling physically awkward; he'd worked for a trained command over his body since he was a very young man, but the sheath was over there, out of reach, and if he moved for it with Blair in the way, the blade would be too close to him. If Jim lifted the blade, there was an implicit threat that made him queasy. "For Christ's sake, Sandburg, get up!"

Blair's hair was quite short at the back; it feathered gently over his nape and Jim was caught in unwilling fascination. "Are you going to listen to me without rolling your eyes every thirty seconds?" Blair asked. His head remained bowed, and Jim swallowed hard.

"Yes!"

Blair stood. There was no triumph in his face, and that depressed self-effacement only served to piss Jim off anew.

"I didn't know you were such a drama queen. What if I'd taken you up on your offer?"

"I've lived times and places where you'd have been within your rights with a servitor or a liege-man who failed you the way I've done."

"And here I thought we were friends," Jim said, and pushed the sword back in its sheath and put it away, out of sight, out of mind, in the coat closet.

Blair hadn't taken his jacket off. His hands were stuffed into the pockets now that he was standing again, and he stood hunched in the middle of the room and uncharacteristically silent. Jim regarded him a long moment and then said, "It's too small in here. Let's talk on the porch."

"Too small," Blair muttered, but he went out into the chilly spring afternoon and sat on the stoop, turned to lean against the balustrade so that he faced Jim, who sat down on a rough bench that was weathered to one step above either antiqueness or firewood.

"It's your show, Sandburg," Jim said, with a small gesture of permission.

Blair took a breath and started talking. "So I'd always known that I was going to have to explain myself eventually, but immortals can get a skewed view of time. When Mendoza - Inez Mendoza, that was her name - challenged me, it was weirdly unexpected, and yeah, I had a plan but I always hoped I'd never have to use it. I figured that I'd explain things to you when the time was right."

Jim offered a comment - Blair needed a chance to catch his breath if nothing else. "And right after Alex wasn't going to be a good time."

" _Alex_ wasn't the issue." Blair looked seriously offended that Jim could think such a thing. "The issue was just how god damned unhappy you were with yet another reminder that you weren't some ordinary joe. And I was supposed to reveal immortals to you, with the additional bonus that you were going to be one?" The wind chose to gust and blow Blair's hair back from his face. He shivered and screwed his hands up each opposite sleeve of his jacket. "And then Mendoza and Thornton made it all moot anyway, and I ran." Without benefit of his hands, Blair made a complicated shimmy of apology. "It was a calculated risk - keeping just enough ahead of Thornton that he thought he could catch me, but not so close behind me that he could contact me. He couldn't use you as leverage if he couldn't actually gloat that he had you. I'm sorry for skipping out on you, but plans made on the fly, you know? That part I can justify."

Jim waited to hear Blair's version of what couldn't be justified. "So Thornton's why you kept your distance. Naomi was upset about that." 

Blair somehow managed to curl himself up into a smaller and even more guilty ball.

"Yeah. Thornton. I got off his radar and I told myself that I owed you an explanation. I know I should have gone back, but I was kind of in trouble. To be honest, Mendoza's quickening didn't rest easy, she kept returning on me like a bad meal-"

"God, Blair, that's not something I needed to hear," Jim sputtered.

Blair's hands had escaped from the shelter of his jacket sleeves and they waved in abject apology. "Sorry, bad analogy. Well, actually, accurate, but bad-taste analogy. And I kept thinking about just how much lying by omission I'd done to you, for years, and that tied up with how you cut your family loose - man, you have kind of a legendary grudge holding ability. And then there was the fountain."

Jim was reminded of interrogations with well-meaning but incoherent witnesses, and decided to assert some control rather than be offended by comments about his ability to hold a grudge. (And he was offended; Jim's issues with his family and with Blair were separate matters. Jim's anger and frustration with Blair had been the curling wave front pushed by a surge of longing. He chose to be grateful that Blair had been prepared to ride out the first crash of sarcasm.) "Why the fountain? Why was that in the back of your mind and not Sierra Verde?"

"Ah," Blair said in a small voice."And now we get to the parts that are really embarrassing."

"Alex drowned you." Jim held back anything more - his own grief, the desperate negation of Blair's grey face and silent heart, the vision that Blair had told him had been shared between the two of them.

Explanations had drained Blair's ability to sit still. He rose and started pacing the front yard, hugging himself. "You came to get me back."

"Unnecessarily, as it turned out."

Blair stopped short, and his eyes widened in outraged astonishment. "No, no way, you don't get to think of it like that, it was an amazing gift."

"That you didn't need." Oh Naomi, Jim mourned. Never mind Blair's issues. Let's talk about mine.

"You didn't know that. You offered and I took, and sentinels... Sentinels are a sacred trust, but I was so not trustworthy with you. I took...." Blair leaned against the porch railing, apparently exhausted by this marathon of talking.

Jim was left in utter confusion; there was something here he was supposed to understand and be distressed by, but all he had was blankness. 

"What? What did you take?"

Blair's face lifted to peer through the rails like a prisoner through bars. "You were pulling me, but you were pushing too - energy to force the healing, and I kept it, kept a part of your quickening. How did you think I forced you out of the warehouse? If I could just command anybody like that then Mendoza would never have got anywhere near me! But I couldn't even do that properly - you were way too close when Mendoza died."

When you killed her, Jim carefully did not say. "So that would be how you found me when _I_ died." One day that wouldn't sound strange to him. " If that's the case I'd say I did okay out of the deal."

"You'd have done more okay if I'd gotten over myself, and come back to you and tried to figure out how to give you back your piece of your fucking soul, Jim. But I liked having it, liked having that little part of you, and then when you died...."

Blair looked truly ill, and Jim was struck with an unpleasant insight. "I don't remember anything during those five days. Actually reviving sucked balls-" -Blair's laugh sounded like it might choke him- "but I don't remember anything in between."

"Good, that's good," Blair said.

"You remember, though." Blair didn't try to deny it, and swift anger and a grieved revulsion flowed through Jim - for Blair, not against him. "That's more punishment than I'd have ever wanted, Chief."

"Really, really crap nightmares," Blair mumbled. His face was buried in his crossed arms.

Jim rose from his bench and sat on the steps. "Sandburg, come over here and sit down before you fall down."

Blair pushed himself off the railing and looked at Jim. Whatever he saw convinced him and he came and dropped ungracefully onto the smooth, swept concrete. Their arms brushed against each other - the first physical contact between them since the night that Blair killed Mendoza.

Jim was looking out over the tidy yard and driveway, and the fringe of trees that veiled his utilitarian accommodation from the more palatial getaway that he looked after. He looked straight ahead, but somehow he still saw Blair's sideways check that yes, the two of them sat together and were touching. Blair said, "I'm sort of serious about the sword."

"It looks like a good sword."

"No, I mean, if you wanted, you know. To take your quickening back."

Jim clenched his fists. "It's the end of the twentieth century, Sandburg. Time for you to move with the times and put all that feudal bullshit behind you."

Blair rocked forward, his knuckles pressed to his mouth. "Oh, now you've decided to be all modern man." The tone was joking. The heart rate was still panicky fast - must have been ever since Blair started up the private road that led here. It must hurt Blair, the way that Jim's heart hurt him.

"But you're right that you owe me a little atonement, so we'll have to work something out."

Blair stayed bent over; it hid his face. "Jim, I've just confessed to lying to you, to subverting your autonomy, to being a _seething_ mass of neuroses, a complete flake, and yet I'm willing to bet that your idea of atonement is going to involve me hanging around."

"It's what you want or you never would have come back in the first place."

Blair sighed. "Yes. But that doesn't mean that it's a good idea."

"Let's have lunch," Jim said. "I was going to have macaroni - with a salad on the side, so you can get that look off your face. You should be grateful that I'm not stuffing my face with Wonderburger since I don't exactly need to worry about my arteries anymore."

Blair shook off surprise at the abrupt change of subject to say, "There is no Wonderburger in Wisconsin."

"One of many things I miss about Cascade," Jim said, and rose to his feet, aware that Blair followed behind him.

They had lunch (after Jim cleaned the spilled coffee off the floor). Jim went out to finish the tree trimming, and Blair helped, sturdy and sure as he always was, bitching about heights and trees the way he always did.

"I guess I can't call you 'junior' anymore," Jim said, as they dragged the branches to the back of Jim's cabin to be cut into kindling and firewood later.

"I'm already seeing advantages to this big reveal of the truth." Blair was the perfect straight man in this declaration, and Jim laughed. Maybe unwillingly, but he still did it.

"How old were you? When you died?" That came out easily, and a small satisfaction filled Jim. He still had trouble believing all this was real, but he could plausibly pretend to normality.

"Probably about twenty-three, but my early life was on the precarious side, so no guarantees. I might have been younger." Blair raised his head, pure mischief in his expression. "And now I'm over six hundred years old, and you, my friend, are always going to be the younger man in this association."

"So long as you don't expect me to be your toy-boy we'll be fine." It was unthinking reflex, the sort of teasing that had been second nature between them once upon a time, and then Jim realised what he'd said and winced.

Blair's face stayed fine exactly until the wince. "I, uh, didn't mean it like that," Jim said.

"You bet, with that beard? No way." Blair tried but he couldn't hit the right note. There was a silence and then Blair said, with less gallantry but more honesty, "I guess that Naomi filled you in."

"I'm a sentinel, Chief, and I'm not completely unobservant. I was starting to guess on my own."

Blair bent and picked up a few small branches that had fallen away before they could be added to the main pile of wood. His face was flushed. "And you still want me to hang around?"

"Yes," Jim said. Awkward silence returned, and then Jim sighed. "Come on, I'll show you the big house."

Blair hesitated a moment and then nodded. "Lead on."

The 'big house' looked out over the lake in showy mock-rustic splendour. Jim let them in the front entranceway and then gave Blair the guided tour over the six bedrooms and six and two half bathrooms, the stainless steel main kitchen that was nearly the same size as Jim's entire house, the living areas with their floor to ceiling windows.

"Oh. My. God," Blair commented in disapproving awe. "Someone has serious money." He stared out over the lakeside with more enthusiasm. "But this looks like a good spot for you. Peace and quiet, plenty of nature."

"It could be worse, " Jim said. "But it gets kind of lonely."

"Jim..." It came out discomfited. Blair's shoulders were hunched again, his fists balled into his pockets.

"Stay for dinner," Jim said.

Blair straightened his shoulders. "It's one way to measure out time, one artery clogging meal at a time."

"Immortal healing, Chief."

Blair's expression declared himself impervious to Jim Ellison's bullshit. It was like going back in time, as was Blair's testy, "That doesn't negate the day to day effects of poor nutrition - and trust me, this I know. You want that body in top notch condition, you should eat properly."

Jim grinned. "This is all strangely familiar. Come on. You can survive one night of bad eating."

Blair gestured with his hands. "I yield, man. Feed me."

He yielded in another small but important way when he consented to stay the night in Jim's guest room. He had a very small bag of necessities with him. "Still travelling light?" Jim asked.

"I haven't had much chance to accumulate recently." Blair smiled. "Maybe another life."

"Maybe," was all Jim said. "Good night, Chief."

There had been nobody else in this house since Jim came here. He knew that he'd gone to ground and made a hermit of himself, even grown the hermit beard in earnest of intentions, but it had never seemed so obvious as it did now with the soft sounds of another human being out of sight behind the closed bedroom door. Jim didn't care what the speculations were as to immortal origins - no-one to his mind was more human than Blair. He fell asleep with his senses at rest, but still somehow aware of the man in the next room, sleeping, breathing, present.

Jim woke early. He rolled over, he thumped his pillow, he focused only on his breaths, in and out, in and out. Sleep thumbed its nose at him and ran, and Jim gave up the chase and sat up in his bed. Everything was quiet at 4.36 am and in unexpected panic Jim gave his hearing free rein and then sagged against the headboard of his bed. Blair's breathing still came from the other room. As if in reminder, the never ending hum of presence rose out of white noise status.

Jim rose from his plain, comfortable bed. It was dark, but he didn't need to turn on a light. It wasn't a question of sight, but of rigid order and few belongings. Jim knew where everything was in this room. He picked up the sweats he wore sometimes around the house and put them on. It was too cold to wander in his underwear.

The carpet felt odd under his feet; Jim had always preferred hard surfaces - wood, tile, concrete. He should have a shower, or make some coffee. Instead he lingered outside Blair's door before he opened it and stepped inside like a thief hiding in the dark. Once inside he sidled sideways and leaned against the bureau built into the wall, standing very still.

It was dark outside and it was dark within, and Blair's breathing was shallow and steady. He  
lay on his back, while Jim traced him out in the dark with little signatures of sound and scent and body heat. This time yesterday morning Jim had assumed that he'd never see Blair again, and something thick and resentful rose in the back of his throat and he knew he should leave this room.

But it was too late. Blair stirred restlessly and then lay very still. "Jim?" he said, and rose up on one elbow.

"What's your name now?"

There was silence before Blair rubbed his face with one hand. "Hell of a wake-up call you have in Wisconsin. As compared to 'sorry for stalking you awake'?"

"As you say." 'Sorry' wouldn't make Jim any less inappropriate so he decided to dispense with apologies.

Blair left the light alone. "My name. Why does that matter anyway, and what's the time?"

"It's about a quarter of five, and I just wondered. Since we were awake anyway."

"Yeah, we're awake," Blair muttered. "Jesus, not even five o'clock."

"Sorry. Do you want some coffee?"

There was a snort of breath, a tiny huff of mingled amusement and disgust. "Only if you're making it _anyway_."

"So," Jim said, "What's your name these days?"

Blair stilled once more. Jim could almost feel the inward, defensive contraction, before Blair sighed and said, "Joseph Marcus," in a tone that dared Jim to make something of it. "I'd used variations on Blair my last three 'incarnations'. Time to move on."

Was that significant, or just Blair pissy at being woken up by Jim's weird neediness. "I'll go make that coffee."

Jim started the coffee and attempted to find some calm. When Blair emerged, he was dressed in the armour of last night's clothes, and Jim tried to make the apology that had seemed so pointless in the dark of the bedroom.

"That was kind of creepy of me. I'm sorry."

Blair tried to smooth down his unruly, bed head curls, and smiled uncertainly. "How about you just give me some coffee and we'll forget it." He settled himself in one plain armchair and reached out his hand for the cup that Jim handed to him. He sipped, and sighed with the quiet satisfaction of the satisfied caffeine addict. 

Jim sat at his table, and drank his own coffee, staring into the cup now and again. "I thought we could drive into town later. I was thinking lunch, but maybe breakfast - since we're awake so early."

"Bribing me with food can't work indefinitely, man." It sounded sympathetic, almost pitying.

"If bribery won't work, what about emotional manipulation? There was this guy, Blair Sandburg, he helped me with the sentinel thing, I don't see why he can't help me with the immortal thing."

Blair dropped his eyes to do a little staring at coffee cups for himself. "I'm maybe not the best person to help with the immortal thing."

"You're still alive," Jim snapped. "I'd have thought that makes you eminently qualified."

Blair shifted in his seat - and Jim almost laughed. This he recognised, Blair Sandburg in lecture mode. "Jim - immortal society, it's like any other society. It has its rules and its conventions and its traditions...."

"And you cheat at the Game. Except that you don't."

The lecture couldn't get past the gape. "Excuse me?"

Jim stated the obvious. "One fumble or wrong twitch getting at that gun and Carmen Miranda would have had you. Cheating isn't actually supposed to put you at a disadvantage. You should have fired earlier or else gone against her with something that wasn't a stupid little machete. You own a sword - why don't you use it?"

Blair straightened up. " _You_ own a sword. I gave to you."

"So why do that if you hate the Game?" Jim enquired with not so sweet reason.

Blair's free hand waved in front of him. "The Game still has to be dealt with, and if I wasn't giving you the tools to deal with it I wouldn't be doing my job."

Jim's lips curled back from his teeth in something that probably didn't look like a smile. "So I'm still your job? You admit that you should teach me?"

Blair stood to put his cup in the kitchen. It was placed with care in the sink, and then Blair leaned against the counter in a gesture of 'give me strength'. "Jim...." he began.

Jim felt such a fool. "Or was this visit just about giving us closure before you bolt somewhere else and dream yourself up a new sentinel?"

Blair spun about. He hadn't put his glasses on, and on his face was an all too familiar expression of wounded anger. "I'm beginning to see why you focused on Alex. It's not about what you did, it's about what I did. Worried that you were going to be replaced even then, were you?"

It was like being stripped naked on a public street. "Fuck you, Sandburg," Jim said, and walked out the door. Better to walk through it than punch a hole in it. How had he put it yesterday? Too small? Yes, this little house was far too small, and Jim was suddenly desperately homesick for the spaciousness of his loft in Cascade, for the petty but still precious possessions left behind, for the familiar city and the knowledge that he had a place there. He stopped out on the porch. It was dark, and it was cold but air didn't hem him around the way the walls of the house behind him did. He inhaled the cool forest scents. It was close enough to dawn that birds were beginning to sing.

The door behind him opened, casting a wedge of light onto the porch. "Hey," Blair said. "That was out of line. I'm sorry." He shut the door but stayed behind Jim, silent. Observing.

"Would this take such a big chunk out of our excessively long lifetimes?" Jim asked. "Just spending some time together until we actually had the chance to get sick of each other?"

"I've been worried that we were already reaching that point."

"I was sick of the dissertation, not you."

Blair's breath hitched. "Jim. You know how I feel about you. What are we going to do about that, huh?"

"We've got things to work out. That could be one of them." Jim knew that he was asking a lot of Blair, but he twisted slightly and put his arm out in a beckoning gesture. Blair came forward and tucked himself against Jim's side; tentatively, his arm reached around Jim's waist and then settled there more surely. Jim let his hand curve around the ball of Blair's shoulder under his sweater.

"Excessively long life time?" Blair asked. His voice was gentle. "Jim, I get why you want me to stay - I'm something familiar when you're faced with a scary situation."

"Fear based responses again, Chief?" He kept himself where he was, still holding on to Blair, but his throat was tight.

"Yeah, and it's not like I don't know what those are like. Oh man, projection much on my part? That's kind of embarrassing to look back on."

Jim took some more breaths of cold morning air. "The way I see it, it's like this. You can choose to bottle it up inside or we can work on it."

Blair shrugged, and then he went very still against Jim's side, recalling that painful quarrel nearly two years gone. Jim wasn't surprised that Blair remembered it. He hadn't forgotten it, after all. Blair's tongue came out to moisten his lips. "So you listen to me so that you can use my own arguments against me?"

Blair wasn't actually trying to move away but Jim tightened his grip around him anyway."I'm a competitive man, and it's an applicable argument. Or what about this one? I'd have done more okay if you'd come back to me and figured out how to give me back my piece of my soul." He dared to turn his head towards Blair's face to be obvious that he was looking. Blair couldn't see Jim as much more than a shape in the dark, but there was enough light for Jim to see Blair's face twist.

"Joseph Blair Marcus."

"What?" Jim asked.

"Joseph _Blair_ Marcus. Because you're a stubborn son of a bitch who's prepared to adjust only so far to the inevitable."

There was the bare beginning of light showing in the eastern sky, and Jim's feet were getting cold. "You'll just have to teach me, then." He lifted his hand to thread it through Blair's unfamiliarly short hair, and leaned in closer until the strands brushed and tickled against his mouth. Feeling a little stupid, hoping he wasn't making a promise he couldn't keep, he pressed a kiss against Blair's head. It was chaste, but it wasn't brotherly or teasing, and he couldn't explain to himself the little leap in his chest - like seeing home after a long journey.

Except the journey was ahead.

**Author's Note:**

> When getting ready to post this story I gave thought, for the shortest of moments, to tagging this Blair/Naomi. For the laughs, you understand. However, since readers who are squicked by incest would turn away, and readers who like incest would be disappointed, I refrained. But I was tempted. 
> 
> Understandably when you have a cool idea, people look at the concept and think, 'but I don't _want_ all these interesting characters to have to die/kill each other, and I met several fanfic stories that question the inevitability of the the Game and the Gathering. I approved, and gave that viewpoint to Blair.


End file.
